Best portable electronic translator?

July 6, 2005 5:27 AM

I'm looking for the best portable electronic translation solution. I 'd like a technology that is compact, for which high-quality bidirectional translation dictionaries between a range of languages already exist, and that allows expansion to new languages (hopefully an expansion that is actually going to happen).

There are a lot of products out there. Advice from people who have had experience using a product for translating relatively sophisticated vocabulary would be especially appreciated.

Adding dictionary software to a Palm was suggested in this thread, but the site linked to for dictionaries on there seems only to offer very small dictionaries. If there are sources for better dictionaries, I'd like to know about those too, but in any case I'm looking for the best solution whatever the hardware that it runs on.

posted by paul! to technology (2 comments total)

Caveat Emptor: In my experience, machine translation is still in its paleolithic phase, i.e.: it sucks. I've had a few large translating projects and tried to do a first rough draft using desktop translating applications, and invariably decide that fixing all the errors is more work than just translating the whole thing by hand.
So by all means, use whatver people suggest for quick word or phrase translations, but don't think you can actually rely on it for anything long or complex.
posted by signal at 8:16 AM on July 6, 2005

No no, I'm just looking for a device that performs the same functions as an ordinary translation dictionary.
posted by paul! at 11:06 AM on July 6, 2005